Friday, November 11

Business Partners in SAP Business One

After Reading this post, you will be able to outline the three types of business partners that exist in SAP business one. You will also be able to describe how the business partners records are structured, including how to activate and deactivate a partner record.


There are three types of business partners in SAP business one. These are vendors , customers and leads. They are used in the following cases. A vendor master record is used to handle all the purchasing transactions. When the balances are integrated with the general ledger or accounting system, through one or more accounts. A customer master record id used to handle all sales transactions. Customer balances are also integrated to the general ledger through one or more control accounts. A lead can be used to handle sales opportunities, orders and quotations. However they cannot affect the accounting side of the system. If you want to post an invoice against the lead you must first convey them to a customer. It is also important to note that the business partner code must be unique for customers, vendors and leads , as well as general ledger account codes. If you want a customer to also be a vendor, you must create a separate business partner record.

The business partner master record contains of large amount of useful data, ranging from the addresses of the business partner , the currency that they trade in, their account balances, the contacts for the business partner, the sales employee assigned to the partner, and a group against which you can report about the business partner. We will discuss these throughout the topic.

The business partner master record contains the various balances for a customer. These balances are displayed depending upon the currency of the business partner. The balances shown are the account balance, the delivery balance , the order balance and the opportunities. The account balance is a combination of open invoices that have not been paid. Open deliveries list those deliveries that have not yet been invoiced. The order balance list the open orders that have not been delivered. And the opportunities aree opportunities that are not yet been closed or turned into an order. In SAP business one it is possible to create a report from these balances showing the data. This is often a useful overview of the business partners activity. It is also possible to view this report in a graph format.

Lets see a demo of the possible type of business partners as well as checking the balance of the business partners account balance and seeing a breakdown of a balance within a report. In the screen showing the general layout of the master record, there are three different types of business partners in the dropdown list. If we open a business partner, we can see that the field is populated . here we choose a customer from the system. And we see that the business partner type is set to customer. We also notice the currency of the business partner which is set to british pounds. And this system is said to be on the national or local currency . on the right hand side of the screen we can notice the balances that we discussed earlier with graph icons next to the balances.

In SAP business one it is possible to create relationships between business partners of the same type. For example one customer might be the parent of another customer. The parent customer may pay for the invoices raised against its subsidiaries or it might accept invoices raised against the leverage to the subsidiaries. These two types of relationships are possible with SAP business one.

In SAP business one it is also possible to categorize the business partners into groups. These groups can range from the size of the partner, for example the big partner groups, the small partner groups or the very important partners. Or it could be related to the products they sell or purchase such as sports equipment or clothing. Groups can be further broken down by the type of business partner. You can have a customer group and a vendor group. They are an extremely useful way of breaking down of the business partners for reporting and analysis. Let us see how to create a new group in the next demonstration.

In SAP business one there are 64 different properties that you can assign to any individual business partner. These properties can be used in numerous ways. The most common use of the property is to indicate the location of the business partner. The default setting in the business one for the top eight properties is to set a location. However all of these locations can be edited by the user. The locations might range from north to south or from continent to continent. Business partners can be grouped by property for further analysis.

In this demonstration we will learn how to add a new property and a group to a business partner. And then view a source analysis report using the group and property name. we first have to open a business partner data record.

In SAP business one it is possible to assign multiple contact persons for each business partner. A tab is available for this information in the business partner master data. The tab includes general details such as contact numbers and name, as well as remark fields. It is also possible in business one to select a contact as a default contact and have this person as the first port of call on any source or a document.

In SAP business one, there is a possibility of having both the billing for shipping and the delivery addresses . this is important as the company does not always want to ship to the same location as warehouse or store every time. A company may also have multiple offices and depending on the amount of the amount of invoice they may want to bill a different location. Now we shall she how to enter a ship- to address.

In this demonstration we are going to create a new default contact person for a business partner. We will also create a shipping or a delivery address for goods to be sent to. For creating a new contact, we click on the contacts tab. We then select define new and begin to fill the data fields on the right hand side of the screen. We are going to create a source contact and we are going to update the email address, the telephone number. You can see the other settings there. Also important is the remarks field where we can store information and about a particular contact, their interests, their likes and dislikes. We should just finish completing that. Once we have entered all the information we should just click update to update the customers record. To make the contact the default, you will see a button at the bottom of the screen which we can use to set the contact person as the default. When they are the default their name appears in board. To add a ship- to address click on the addresses tab ,and click on the arrow next to ship-to. This then opens up and gives us the option of defining it. You click on this and then begin filling the data on the right hand side of the screen. Let us set us an address in London for example. Then we click update. We once again make this the default address by selecting it and then setting it as default.

There are many situations where a customer may want to block transactions to a particular supplier or customer or business partner. In SAP business one it is possible to set a customer or supplier as active or inactive. Business one gives you the option of placing a partner on hold so that no transactions can be made until it has been unfrozen. It also gives you the option to making it inactive for a set period of time. This could be used for some promotions.

In SAP business one, it is sometimes necessary to deactivate a business partner record. They may be for example having a number of invoices and you do not want to take any more orders until these invoices have been paid. We do this by making the customer inactive or on hold. Here we open the transport master record and we tick the on hold button and update the business partner master record. This shows top transactions being made against trandsports. To check this we open the sales order. Now we select trandsports as our business partner. As we select this on the board, we receive a warning that the customer is frozen. We can overwrite this by selecting yes. We now add an item to the order, the delivery dates and click add. When we confirm the act, we receive the error telling that the customer is frozen. Hence we are unable to make any transactions against this customer because it is on hold. To activate this partner again we untick the on- hold box. In the business partner master record.

You have now completed the topic in business partners in SAP business one. After this session, now you will be able to outline the three types of business partners available, and the transactions that are possible against each of the type. You will also be able to describe how the business partner records are structured ,including the process of making a business partner active.

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